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Emilia Clarke’s Health Battle
While fans know Emilia Clarke for her intense performances in Game of Thrones battle scenes, she revealed a real-life struggle in 2019 through a heartfelt essay for The New Yorker, poignantly titled “A Battle for My Life.”
Clarke recounted a harrowing moment at the gym when she was overwhelmed by a severe headache. “I barely made it to the toilet before collapsing to my knees, struck by waves of violent illness,” she described. “The pain was relentless—shooting, stabbing, and constricting. Deep down, I feared the worst: my brain was in trouble.”
Urgently, she was rushed to the hospital for a brain scan.
“The diagnosis was swift and grim,” Clarke explained. “I was suffering from a subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH), a critical stroke caused by bleeding around the brain. It was the result of an aneurysm, a rupture in one of my arteries.”
Emilia had immediate surgery to seal the aneurysm, calling the pain “unbearable.” While she was recovering, she continued, she experienced aphasia and was “muttering nonsense.”
A week later, “the aphasia passed,” Emilia added, and she left the hospital a month after being admitted.
At a 2013 brain scan, she learned a growth “doubled in size” and that she needed surgery again.
“When they woke me, I was screaming in pain,” she wrote. “The procedure had failed. I had a massive bleed and the doctors made it plain that my chances of surviving were precarious if they didn’t operate again. This time they needed to access my brain in the old-fashioned way—through my skull.”
Thankfully, Emilia shared, she’s now “at a hundred per cent.”